


by your ancient names

by mishcollin



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Biblical References, Gen, Glory Zine, Mythology References, Other, POV Castiel (Supernatural)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-10
Updated: 2019-03-10
Packaged: 2019-11-15 00:35:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18063206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mishcollin/pseuds/mishcollin
Summary: In the ancient days, he had no name. Not to humans, anyway.





	by your ancient names

**Author's Note:**

> This was my Cas-centric, standalone piece for the 2018 [Glory! zine](http://www.castielzine.tumblr.com). Title is pulled from Lord Huron's song "Ancient Names."

In the ancient days, he had no name. Not to humans, anyway. Even his siblings, at that point in the long arc of angelic history, had communicated with one another through tongueless, buzzing emissions, only detectable 34 degrees off a crimson newborn sun. The Bible had come along later and effectively cleared some things up.

Technically, the Greeks had been the first to name him. It was a curious and bemusing thing to him then, the idea of naming—that humans could pin one word, one tongue-shape, to a conduit of the cosmos. He certainly hadn’t ever considered a name for himself, until then.

In humanity’s adolescent days, he gravitated to holier places, those consecrated with lamb blood and the psalms of languages long, long forgotten. The mountain they called Olympus had been no exception, especially with all the sacrifices and such. He had been instructed, through the sanctimonious hum-spitting of an older sister, not to drift too close during the ceremonies. There was something about the peak of Olympus that truly did pierce the thin membrane between heaven and earth, and while the Greeks had gotten several things wrong, as humans are wont to do, they had banked on the right mountain. At the time, contact with humans was strictly forbidden, for reasons that he hadn’t questioned yet.

Still, the heady tang of burnt thyme, the warm splash of blood on the cracked temple stones, had proven too irresistible to investigate, so he’d brought his sister, later named Aanaa, along with him, as she often enabled his curious impulses. It had stormed that day, but the Greeks were nothing if not stubborn, so despite the electricity humming low in the sky, the dark clouds spilling out over the mountaintops like volcanic ash, they had proceeded with their ceremonies, wrangling a few reluctant and moody goats up the steep rocky trails.

In Enochian, Aanaa had told him, “We must be careful.” (The humans called her Athena at the time.)

He had seven wings then, if they could be called wings. At full breadth, the tips could brush the snows on seven different mountaintops. In response to Aanaa’s advice, he unfurled them, tangled up in the lightning and rain.

Aanaa said something which was the Enochian equivalent of, “Showboat.”

Thunder gripped the sky and shook the mountains, and the Greeks quaked, but the curling smoke of thyme and ash still drifted up to the heavens. The priests still began their chants, interspersed with the indignant bleats of the goats. He and Aanaa watched, instinctively lured by the sanctity of their rituals.

The temple was one for the Greeks’ favorite gods, the temperamental father of lightning and the sky, perched bravely in the ethereal balance where two worlds intersected. They asked the god, as they cut the throats of the cattle, for a plentiful harvest, for safety from his wrath.

Thrumming with the storm, with the heat of the blood and the wine, he (nameless then) had plucked the lightning right from the sky and struck the top of the temple—perhaps to show he was listening. That anyone was. That their sacrifices and their rites hadn’t been in vain.

The priests looked heavenward with ashen faces, eyes luminous with awe, their clasped hands rusting over with dried blood.

“Hail Zeus,” they murmured, and knelt. “Hail Zeus.”

Zeus it was. For a short time, anyway.

—

They called him in multitudes, most in languages long buried and never excavated. Later, in another time, they would call him God.

Perhaps this was why angels had no names, not initially. Individuality was inimical to their very nature; hubris was a death wish. As were most things.

—

Egypt hadn’t come too much later after Greece. After Egypt, blood would lose its allure to him entirely. The wrath of YHWH looked and smelled much like blood, even though YHWH was nowhere to be found that day. The blood ran ankle-deep, trickling sluggishly through the dirt roads in thin crimson creeks; everywhere, the screams of the dying, the keening of grieving mothers and the cries of babies and children. (Much later, he would observe that for as much as the Bible had enshrined a benevolent God, He seemed to have a pagan thirst for the jugular.)

He watched his sister Naomi (then Naaa) cut down a young boy like a stalk of corn. No mercy, no hesitation, sure and cold as iron. He reeled. The misery around him was as palpable as mist.

Naomi turned and called him by his wordless name, then with one of her spiked wings, gestured to the next house. His orders were clear. Spare those shielded by lamb’s blood, and kill the others. It was, in several regards, his first formal smiting.

He waded through that necropolis alone, unable to face his siblings. Afraid of the defection they would surely see taking root in him, the fissure slowly splintering out into more cracks and spreading, spreading.

When it was his turn to kill, to channel the wrath of YHWH as he was purposed and furnished to do, he searched inward and found nothing but his own resolve. There were no gods in Egypt that day.

The boy, a firstborn son no older than twelve, had looked up at him with fearful dark eyes, cowering in the eclipse of a blotted-out sun, his mother gripping his hand and pleading, screaming. He remembers that even in his fear, the boy shielded his mother with his body, his mouth set into a firm line, facing down the bloodthirst of heaven alone. It was far from the first time that the unadorned courage of humans had made him question his own, and it would be far from the last.

He took the boy and ran. Later, he would be stripped and flayed and cauterized until he had no recollection of the event, but now he remembers, and then, he fled.

“What is your name?” the boy had asked in Egyptian, as they took flight over pearl-washed desert sands as wide as oceans. Opalescent under a full moon and a star-studded sky.

He thought of the boy shielding his mother, a lone pillar resisting the ire of the heavens.

“Castiel,” he had answered, and made it so.

—

He opens his eyes.

He’s in Ireland now, among the weathered, stone ruins of a sanctuary on the island of Skellig Michael. The monks used to pray here in solitude, cocooned in thick fog and silver mists, invisible to the naked eye. Swallowed whole by the winds and rain and sea, set adrift from the pulse of the outside world. Local legends have it that here, like Olympus, the planes of heaven and earth touch, shift over one another like tectonic plates. He had come here years ago as a different being, scouring the earth for a missing god; back then, he’d been carved into the shape of a mission, a drive, a conviction so holy it seared. They said that in the thin places, time folded in on itself like pinched velvet. You could step from one era into the next. He had lived a thousand eras by a thousand different names, and he feels the ancient weight here acutely, surrounded by just the mossy crags and the gray churning waters. Ironically enough, regarding names, the place had been named for his brother, Michael. The Irish monks had been unaware, apparently, that Michael was a colossal asshole.

He thinks he can relate to the monks, in a way; they’d used the island primarily as a safe harbor from persecution. He too, after all, always found refuge in sacred places.

His grace coils up suddenly, bright like the blue of a flame behind his eyes, and for a moment, he thinks he’s simply reacting to the island; then a distinct buzz fills his ears, humming until it clears into something recognizable. A prayer.

_— Come in, Houston! Man, the Wifi on your end is shitty. We’ve got pizza waiting for you._

He closes his eyes and allows the breadth of his wings to fill the island, then the sea.

Kansas-bound.

_— Hey, are you coming home tonight?_

_— Cas?_

His final name. And, perhaps, his favorite one.


End file.
